Fall Back Down When I Die

by Joe Wilkins

  The microwave dinged. Tricia clicked open the plastic door and handed Gillian a boiling cup of mud-colored coffee, then poured herself a cup as well and stuck it in the microwave. Gillian thanked Tricia and sipped at hers. Jesus, it was terrible.

  Gillian ran her hand over the polished wood of one of the kitchen chairs, the fine grain of the wood, the sure, sloping lines of the lathe work. The table and chairs, far too big for the trailer’s kitchen space, were a beautiful set. They were built with great skill and care and had belonged to Tricia’s grandmother, it turned out, though all Tricia could say was what a bitch they’d been to move. The table was covered now in junk—plates crusted with ketchup, binoculars and fencing pliers, a slung hunting jacket.

  The microwave sounded again and Tricia began to transfer the detritus to the kitchen counter, which was itself covered in dirty dishes and half a dozen pink plastic Mary Kay starter kits. She grabbed at the hunting jacket, and as she balled it up to toss it down the hallway, Gillian couldn’t help noticing that the sleeves from just below the elbow, as well as the entire bottom half, were stained a dark, rusty color, as if the wearer had waded up to mid-torso into a pool of motor oil or blood. Gillian’s vision thinned. She took an awkward step. Coffee lapped over the edge of the mug and slapped the linoleum.

  Tricia stared a moment, as if trying to decide whether to be angry, then crumpled a few paper towels and tossed them to the ground.

  Gillian braced herself against the nearest chair.

  —I’m sorry, she said. I should sit.

  Tricia dumped the wadded towels in a plastic garbage can and leaned against the counter.

  —What did you say your name was?

  Gillian breathed and crossed her legs, collecting herself.

  —Gillian Houlton. I’m the assistant principal over at Colter. I called about Tavin, your son.

  —Right, yeah. Well, what’s he done?

  Tavin had been missing a lot of school, Gillian explained. It was only the middle of September, and he’d already missed six days, and ten was the state limit for the whole year. After that, if his teachers were of a mind, they could fail him and he’d have to repeat the eighth grade, which might be especially tough since he was already big for his age.

  Tricia flipped her bangs off her forehead.

  —Christ, she said. I can’t make him go. He’s so big, like you say. And he just worships Brian right now. Brian doesn’t think much of government education.

  Tricia paused, poked her left thumbnail in her mouth, and chewed at it until little bits of purple polish winked from the corners of her lips.

  —He was a little boy for so long, you know. And now he’s not.

  —I know what you mean, Gillian said. Mine is a senior this year, and I can’t figure out how it happened.

  She paused and sipped at her coffee.

  —If Tavin really idolizes his father, maybe I should talk with him?

  Tricia stared at her for a time, as if she couldn’t quite decide. Then grabbed a pack of menthols off the shelf over the sink, cranked one of the stove coils to a red-orange glow, and lit the cigarette off it. She spoke in a rush of smoke.

  —Brian isn’t Tavin’s dad. I had him by Jimmy Stensvad.

  —I see. Does Tavin still have a relationship with Jimmy?

  —Jimmy’s dead. Fell out of a truck bed.

  Tricia took another drag and sat down. She wiped at her eyes.

  —They were all out drinking and driving around and raising hell, spotlighting coons or something. Stupid son of a bitch. He was so good and so stupid. It wasn’t but a couple of weeks after graduation. I was pretty far along but still wasn’t showing. We were planning the wedding, a honeymoon in Rapid City. Everything.

  How much to reveal? Gillian wondered. Enough to make a connection but no more.

  —I’m so sorry, she said. It won’t help, but I know how you feel. I lost my husband too. Years ago now, but I don’t know that I’ll ever really be over it.

  Tricia coughed and stood and spit into the sink. She wiped her nose on a paper towel and dried her eyes with the sleeves of her sweatshirt. It was a strategy that had worked for her in the past, Gillian could tell, using her sorrow this way. But she wasn’t in control of it. Not really. She loved that boy. Maybe he loved her too.

  —Tricia, I’d like to talk to Tavin, if it’s all right. I’m not the cops, I’m not here to get him in trouble. I just want to talk. He’s done well up until now, and I’d hate to see him throw it away. Eighth grade is a pivotal year. Any chance he’s around?

  Tricia dropped her cigarette into her coffee mug, where it hissed against the dregs.

  —He’s out with Brian. Probably miles out into the mountains now.

  —Hunting season doesn’t start for another month, Gillian said.

  She’d tried to stop herself before she spoke, but couldn’t. All these years later she could still hear his voice.

  Tricia tensed, her pack of menthols scrunched in her hand.

  —I thought you said you weren’t the cops.

  Gillian took a big swallow of rancid coffee, punishment for her stupidity.

  —Christ, I’m sorry. My husband used to be with Fish and Game. Guess I’m still in the habit. It’s none of my business.

  Tricia shook another cigarette out of the pack and slipped it between her lips.

  —No, she said, it isn’t. And I think we’ve talked this out. Leave the cup over by the sink. Make sure the door latches behind you.

  Gillian cursed herself as she slammed the car door, cursed herself as she twisted the wheel and gunned the engine, the dogs finally noticing, barking and chasing and biting at her tires before falling away. She cursed herself as the Prius fishtailed up the draw and spun through the loose gravel and dust. Cursed her own stupidity as she turned onto the county road and drove south through the dry coulees and over the windburned ridges of the Bulls, drove as fast as she could back toward the Yellowstone Valley and what passed for civilization.

  She wouldn’t see Tavin for the rest of the year now. Not after that. Tricia would say something to Brian, and Brian would go apeshit, and Tavin would get sent to Delphia, or they’d say they were homeschooling. Kent Leslie, the principal, would fuss and fume in response, worried as he always was about their state funding, which was directly tied to the number of students, and when you had only seventy-odd students in the entire district, even one mattered. And the boy himself, Tavin, would end up just about like his stepdad—running a few cattle, poaching, drinking, doing terrible things to this girl and that girl and having a kid or three, voting Republican even as he lived off the usual rural welfare: government grazing leases and Conservation Reserve Program payments. God, the cycle of rural poverty. Rural stupidity. It was enough to make her insane.

  As she dropped out of the Bulls and into the valley, Gillian thought for a moment about turning west, breezing along the interstate back to her house in Billings, forty miles distant, showering, getting dinner ready, having a glass of chardonnay as she waited for Maddy to finish her after-school shift at Starbucks—but it wasn’t yet four thirty, which was when Kent officially let the staff go, and beyond her own fuckup, she couldn’t think of a good enough excuse. Like she’d known she would, she turned east and a few minutes later got off the interstate at the lone exit for Colter.

  Though Colter looked encouraging near the freeway, at least by small-town Montana standards, with Edna’s, the one surviving diner, and a new Chevron boasting an A&W Restaurant both within sight of the exit ramp, its promise soon played out. The frontage road cut through a scrubby patchwork of ditches and overgrazed fields littered with rusted farm equipment, and then, slumped along old Highway 1, came the city proper: a four-by-five grid of gravel and dust featuring an impressive collection of crumbling brick false-fronts, one or two of which, depending on the year and the severity of the most recent drought, housed saloons with names like the Grand, the Branding Iron, and the Ace. Just off Main, as if in counterpoint, lay the old mis
sion Catholic church and the steeply roofed Lutheran church, both sanctuaries shaded by massive, ancient cottonwoods, and on the edge of town, near the rodeo grounds, stretched the brand-new, shedlike evangelical church, the Church of the Plains, whose oiled parking lot baked in any kind of sun. Along the grid of gravel roads in between, scattered here and there, lay a motley collection of maybe three dozen farmhouses, double-wides, and camper trailers, half of which were empty and the other half of which sheltered all the souls of Colter. And of course, at the top of the hill, sat the school—grades K through 12, all in the same low-slung brick building.

  In her office Gillian made some notes on her visit and was about to slide Tavin’s file into the drawer for old cases but caught herself and opened the upper drawer, which was for current students, and put the file in there. Oh, Tavin. Round-faced, beady-eyed, his hair cut so short his scalp was pink with sunburn most of the time. It was possible that Tricia might try to do right by the boy. But what about the stepdad? That’s where the trouble usually was, with the fathers and grandfathers and uncles. What about that Brian? She should have gotten his last name. Another fuckup.

  Gillian leaned back in her chair and eyed the clock—4:17 p.m. Despite days like this, she loved her job, she did, but she’d been at it a long time now and the list of wins in the past couple of decades was short—she put the number of students who’d managed to make even a few solid choices about their lives at maybe a dozen, maybe a few more. It wasn’t for lack of trying on her part. Gillian had planned late into the night, every night, her first years of teaching and still attended conferences every summer. Even before she became assistant principal, she was the one other teachers came to when they needed help, when they needed someone to observe a troublesome class or design an intervention for a particular student. The only reason she’d driven out into the Bulls today was that Mr. Paysinger, the English teacher, had come to her pursing his thin lips and worrying his scraggly chin beard, telling her that Tavin Wilson was already failing eighth-grade language arts, tapping his attendance log to show her how many days the boy had missed. And even as Gillian had known right away what she had to do, she’d also known that it likely wouldn’t be enough, that for most of these kids it would never be enough—a knowledge that was only confirmed when she saw the shivering rib slats of those dogs, the pearlescent underbelly of that deer hide, the hunting jacket dipped in blood. The way Tricia lit her cigarette on the stove coil, her face so close to all that bright, hard heat.

  The first time Kevin Kincheloe ever spoke to her was to ask her to the Foresters’ Ball. That was the fall of 1980 and Gillian was a senior at the University of Montana, working the midnight shift at the library reference desk. She’d seen him around, a skinny, long-legged kid whose sandy hair hung down to the collar of the snap shirt he tucked into dark blue jeans. Often, he would be at a study table in the middle of a jostling group of boys who periodically broke into snorts of laughter that rippled through the silence of the second floor, where Gillian restacked books, her favorites the slim volumes of poetry, which almost disappeared as you shelved them.

  She was taking her last few classes that semester, waiting for her student-teaching placement in the spring. Her father, a thirty-five-year veteran of Kaiser Aluminum in Spokane, a broad man whose back clacked now like dominoes in a wooden box as he reached for his coffee at the breakfast table, had insisted on the double major in education and biology. She didn’t mind. She liked school. As a young girl, she’d almost always finished her seat work long before her classmates, which afforded her plenty of time to daydream herself into the role of teacher. She was sure she’d be both more fun and more firm than her own instructors had been—middle-aged men and women who snuck out for cigarette breaks during reading time and let the boys who made the most trouble put their heads down on their desks and sleep.

  She loved ecology and knew she’d make a good science teacher. Last week for her advanced ecology class, they’d all tromped down to the Clark Fork and pulled caddisflies from the shallows. She’d held one in her hand, watched as the larva slowly hauled its thin legs back into its gravel casing, a fragile assemblage of sticky silk and tiny river stones. What she was less sure about was Montana. When she was applying to college, she’d picked Missoula mostly for the way the town was nestled in a river valley and ringed by green mountains, a nice contrast for a girl from industrial Spokane. But she was discovering that small towns came with their own grim realities. Even the college boys in Missoula, many in from ranches and outpost towns, were somehow louder and harder, their hands thicker than those of the boys she knew back home, who, while they could be coarse, were still city boys, complete with bell-bottom corduroys and hi-fis that spun the Rolling Stones, boys who wore Jimmy Carter lapel pins given to them by their factory-working fathers, union to the core. Until she could apply for licensure in another state, she hoped she might land a teaching position in Missoula, at least, where the university provided a little culture and leavened the politics. After Missoula, she didn’t know where she’d go. Spokane didn’t much feel like home anymore. Her mother had died, of pancreatic cancer, almost a decade ago now, when Gillian was in sixth grade, and after she left for college, her father remarried. He’d even recently built an addition onto the house for his four young stepchildren. She thought she’d travel, thought she’d like to live near a river, someplace thick with birds and trees and trails to the water.

  In the library the fluorescent lights fluttered off, then on, and she continued tracing the life cycle of a caddisfly. Though it didn’t matter for her grade, she was trying in her illustration to get the gravel casing she’d seen on the Clark Fork right, to shade it just so, that bumpy, bright, perfect little house of mottled river rocks.

  —That’s pretty. What you’re working on there.

  She startled, looked up to find the boy from the second floor. Tall, wide-faced, smiling. She asked him if he needed to check out some books and when he said he didn’t she returned to her drawing. But he didn’t move. Just stood there.

  —You ever seen a hatch? he said. A caddisfly hatch?

  She swung her head back up, studied him, as if she might find in the slope of his cheekbone whatever it was that had just set her heart to thumping.

  The hatch was really something, he said, and told her about driving a hundred miles up the Musselshell River just to see it—it was like fog coming off the water. Then, as if this was what naturally came after such an anecdote, he said he was in the forestry school and asked her if she’d like to go to the Foresters’ Ball with him.

  She hadn’t been on a date in over a year. On the last one, although she didn’t smoke, she’d tucked a lit cigarette in her mouth all night to keep the stupid galoot from trying to kiss her. But there beneath the fluorescent light in the library she said yes even before she got the boy’s name.

  After dinner Maddy claimed an Oh-my-God buttload of homework and shut herself in her room. Gillian cleared the dishes and wiped down the counters and the table and loaded the dishwasher, then poured a second glass of wine. She puttered in the backyard for a time—filled the birdbath, splashed water on the tomatoes and herbs—and then sat on the patio in the shade of the ash trees as All Things Considered leaked from the outside speakers, a piece about the developing health-care bill. Last year, Gillian and Maddy had watched the election results come in with all their fellow Obama volunteers at the new brewery downtown. The celebration started early and continued right through the results in Montana, where Obama had cut the distance to just over two percentage points. There’d been lots of talk that night about this being the beginning, about Montana soon turning blue. Gillian sipped at her wine and smiled at the memory. The station cut to local news and her heart stilled a moment, then crashed against the bones of her chest—three quick interviews, all with men who had put in for the wolf lottery and were hoping to draw hunting tags. She could almost smell the tobacco on their breath, see the devil in their eyes. The sunset brightened and twisted i
n the haze of the city, and Gillian lifted her wineglass to her lips, only to find it empty. She went back inside.

  Maddy’s muffled humming and singing drifted down the hall. Gillian set her glass on the counter and gave in to temptation. She started toward her office but paused by her daughter’s door, straining to hear the words: Sometimes it did get lonely but it—

  Silence for half a beat.

  —Mom? Is that you?

  —Oh, sorry, honey. Can I come in?

  —Mom, don’t be creepy. Just knock.

  Gillian gave a slight knock and opened the door, found her daughter sitting on the floor, knees pulled up to her chest, her long, raven-colored hair swept over her head. She had a textbook lolled wide on the floor in front of her and her phone firmly in hand, earbuds dangling around her neck.

  —You have such a nice voice, Gillian said. I miss it.

  Maddy rolled her eyes and turned back to her phone’s glowing screen, balled herself up all the more tightly.

  —You were singing Lightfoot, weren’t you. You know your dad had all his records. After work he used to sit in the basement—remember that old swamp cooler we had in the house along the river?—and he’d listen—

  —You’ve told me this story at least a thousand times.